The Southern Question and Subaltern Social Groups and Classes
The Southern Question and Subaltern Social Groups and Classes
Jordan T. Camp
To cite this article: Jordan T. Camp (2025) The Southern Question and Subaltern Social Groups
and Classes, Rethinking Marxism, 37:2, 170-178, DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2025.2475870
Jordan T. Camp
This essay reflects on Antonio Gramsci’s Subaltern Social Groups: A Critical Edition
of Prison Notebook 25 (Columbia University Press, 2021), edited and translated by the
late Joseph A. Buttigieg and Marcus E. Green. While Gramsci’s concept of subaltern
groups has long inspired scholars of cultural studies, geography, subaltern studies, and
political theory, this work has drawn on a relatively small selection of Gramsci’s
prison writings. This first complete English translation of Gramsci’s writings on
subaltern groups and classes represents a major turning point in Gramscian studies,
showing how Gramsci provided important “methodological criteria” for analyzing race
and class in specific conjunctures. Gramsci’s insights about subaltern groups and
classes as well as the southern question can be “translated” to confront the current
conjuncture.
Key Words: Antonio Gramsci, Political Theory, Subaltern Groups and Classes,
Translation
In late 1934 and early 1935 Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci developed new
notes examining the history of subaltern groups and classes. He did so in poor
health and under twenty-four-hour police surveillance while confined to the
Cusumano clinic in Formia. This new notebook was distinct from others he
had written while incarcerated in a fascist prison in Turi di Bari, where he had
been confined between 1929 and 1933. As indicated on its first page, this notebook
had been printed in “Ditta Cugiini Rossi—Rome” (Gramsci 2021, 1). This special
notebook, alongside all his writings that make up the prison notebooks, explores
a period marked by the rise of fascism and outlines a method with which to com
prehend it. Gramsci was interested in how the defeat of the working-class move
ment was related to its failure to win the allegiances of the peasants of the south
(Rudé 1980, 9), who were depicted by members of the social elite in the north as
“barbaric” and “pathological.” Gramsci titled this notebook, “On the Margins of
History: The History of Subaltern Groups” (Q25, §1; Gramsci 2021, 3).1
1. I follow the lead of Gramsci scholars in citing references to his prison notebooks by notebook
number (Q), note number (§), and page number from the source consulted.
Social Groups demonstrates that Gramsci wrote very clearly about the articulation
of race and class. In turn, this newly translated work shows how he developed a
distinct method for understanding how race and class shaped the consciousness
and autonomous political mobilizations of subaltern social groups and classes.
In doing so, it demonstrates how Gramsci provided important “methodological
criteria” for analyzing race and class in specific historical and geographical con
junctures (Q25, §2; Gramsci 2021, 6; Hart 2002, 27).
In this notebook, Gramsci argues that these methodological criteria could be
understood with precision through a concrete analysis of growing popular con
cerns over race and “criminality” in Italy during the early twentieth century
(Q25, §8; Gramsci 2021, 14). He explains how presiding notions of criminality
had been shaped by University of Turin criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who
had depicted southern Italy as an “inferior civilization,” one that was marked
by a “criminality of blood.” These theories circulated in scholarship as well as
in Avantil!, the Italian Socialist Party publication. Lombroso influenced the emer
gent Italian school of criminology, whose key followers were socialists. These
criminologists, as Peter D’Agostino (2002, 323, 320) notes, “linked racial inferiority
to southern Italian culture.” Their racist theories purported to distinguish a “race”
of criminals; notions that were influential in American criminology as well. Fur
thermore, as Avery Gordon (2011) demonstrates, extensive experiments utilizing
Lombroso’s theories were conducted on prisoners in the United States.
Lombroso’s racist constructions of the Italian South were an important refer
ence for Gramsci in his theorization of the “southern question” (D’Agostino
2002, 323; Gramsci 2000). Gramsci had long been aware of the conceits in the
field of criminology, having studied philology at the University of Turin, where
Lombroso had been a member of the faculty. Gramsci’s attention to popular con
cerns over race and criminality and the “southern question” developed alongside
the rise of fascism as a mass movement and state form. In 1926, Gramsci penned
his important unfinished essay, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question.” It
argues that bourgeois ideology had depicted the peasantry of the Italian South
as “biologically inferior,” that their situation was not the result of capitalist devel
opment, but rather because they were “lazy,” “criminal,” and “barbaric.” At the
same time, it showed how these racist constructions justified the uneven develop
ment of capitalism in southern and northern Italy, as well as imperialism in Africa.
In doing so, it argues for the necessity of building worker and peasant alliances in
the struggle against racism, capitalism, and Italian fascism (Gramsci 2000, 173;
Kipfer and Mallik 2022; Heatherton 2022, 94–5).
Historical-Geographical Context
His writing on the “southern question” represented a shift from his journalism to
his more focused conjunctural analysis in the Prison Notebooks (Gramsci 1994a, 83;
Buttigieg 1992, 21–2; Green 2021, xxxi). There he deployed the method of conjunc
tural analysis in order to theorize fascism as a solution to a crisis of hegemony that
rocked Italy after World War I (Said 1994; Antonini 2021, 150).
In notebook 4 included in Subaltern Social Groups, Gramsci elaborates his “meth
odological criteria” for conjunctural analysis (Q4, §38; Gramsci 2021, 36–47). For
Gramsci, the study of decisive conjunctural moments enables one to analyze
the connections between shifts in the economy and political and ideological pro
cesses. Conjunctural analysis involves an examination of the “relations of force” at
“various levels,” which include the economic, political, and military forces within
a society. The “relation of military forces” is key (Q4, §38; Gramsci 2021, 40). It in
cludes both a technical military dimension, and what Gramsci terms the “politico-
military,” which he defines as “a form of political action that has the virtue of pro
voking repercussions of a military character” (Q4, §38; Gramsci 2021, 40). The po
litico-military is a crucial dimension for comprehending the distinct political form
of fascism in his time, and its resurgence in our own (Camp and Greenburg 2020;
Camp and Heatherton 2023).
In elaborating this research criterion, Gramsci warned about fascism’s “popular
appeal” (Hart 2013, 303). His conjunctural analysis revealed that certain elements
of this political situation were relatively permanent, such as the role of the military
and police in crushing opposition. Yet he noted that other factors fluctuate
rapidly, such as the popular consent to the regime. In this way, Gramsci argued
that the forces of opposition should consider the hegemonic processes that
shape the common sense and political organization among subaltern groups
and classes, as well as the long-term structural forces that shape what is possible
in a specific conjuncture (Q4, §38; Gramsci 2021, 37).
Gramsci’s conjunctural analysis enabled him to render vivid the “specific case of
political crisis” or “crisis of hegemony” that led Italy to become one of the paradig
matic fascist state forms in the twentieth century (Poulantzas 1974, 60). In note
book 25, Gramsci suggests how popular narratives about race and criminality
legitimated the formation of this particular state form. He was concerned with
how the modern state replaced the “mechanical bloc” of social groups with the
production of consent to the “hegemony of the ruling and dominant group.” In
turn, Gramsci suggests how this state form “abolishes certain autonomies” in
the process. Significantly, he also shows these autonomous struggles “will be
reborn in other forms, as parties, trade unions, cultural associations” (Q25, §4;
Gramsci 2021, 9). He concludes by suggesting that “the dictatorships of our time
abolish these new forms of autonomy” and work to “incorporate them into the ac
tivity of the state” as the “dominant class becomes totalitarian” (Q25, §4; Gramsci
2021, 9–10). In this way, Gramsci demonstrates how the hegemony of the ruling
class was linked to the expansion of policing and surveillance to contain opposi
tion (Antonini 2021, 169).
174 Camp
2. For an elaboration of Gramsci’s theory of the integral state, see, e.g., Thomas (2009, 93–5, 137–
41), and Levenson (2022, 162–79).
Subaltern Social Groups 175
subaltern groups and classes through a “living philology” (Buttigieg 1994, 122, 136,
137).
“The continuing significance of Gramsci for our time,” Buttigieg argues, “can
only be made manifest by those meticulous philologists,” who can help readers
understand how he transformed defeat into new ways of theorizing politics (But
tigieg 1994, 138). Inspired by these insights, Gramscian scholars have emphasized
the philological method required to understand Gramsci’s theory in the post–
World War I conjuncture, suggesting a need to “translate” his insights to under
stand the specificities of our own much different conjuncture (Kipfer 2002; Kipfer
and Hart 2013; Hart 2020; Kipfer and Mallick 2022; Camp 2022). Taking up this
challenge, I want to conclude by suggesting that his insights about the history
of subaltern groups and classes can be translated to confront the specific problems
of the current conjuncture. Gramsci provides criteria for analyzing the historically
and geographically specific relationship between the resurgence of neo-fascist po
litical organizations and their “anti-immigrant common sense” and a crisis of U.S.
hegemony and for global capitalism (Broder 2023; Silver and Payne 2020).
3. On “neofascist common sense,” see the interview with Paul Gilroy in Wade (2020).
176 Camp
2013), but are rather the product of political struggles where, as Gramsci put it,
“various outcomes are possible” (Q4, §38; Gramsci 2021, 41).
It is therefore important to remember Gramsci’s “open-ended” conception of
politics. He demonstrates that politics is the product of the “relations of forces”
operating in a specific historical moment and geographical context (Hall 1988,
169). In this way, the challenge is to remain committed to Gramsci’s method,
which provides a “shield against all forms of dogmatism” (Buttigieg 1990, 81).
This is particularly important in the present, when subaltern groups and classes
are recruited for different political projects with antagonistic interests. As
Gramsci warned, subaltern groups are “always subject to the initiatives of domi
nant groups even when they rebel and rise up; only ‘permanent’ victory breaks
their subordination, but not immediately” (Q25, §2; Gramsci 2021, 6).
It is our great fortune that scholars can now engage with Subaltern Social Groups
in translating Gramsci’s understandings in the present. In the wake of the COVID-
19 pandemic, the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and the resurgence of the
far right, it illustrates how to analyze the ways common sense might shape the
self-organized struggles of subaltern classes. It also suggests the failure to investi
gate these dynamics will have deleterious consequences. As Gramsci warned, eco
nomic crises produce not only spontaneous protests among subaltern classes, but
also “conspiracies among the reactionary groups” who seize the moment to
“attempt coups d’état,” as was clear in the 6 January 2021 siege on the United
States capitol that was self-consciously replicated in the Brazilian capitol on 8
January 2023 (Q3, §48; Gramsci 1971, 199). This situation suggests how fascist na
tionalisms “mediate” crises of capitalism in different places and, in doing so,
produce “bizarre combinations” (Kipfer and Hart 2013, 337; Q3, §48; Gramsci
1971, 200). In this context, as Gramsci put it, “every trace of autonomous initiative
by subaltern groups, then, should be of inestimable value to the integral historian”
(Q25, §2; Gramsci 2021, 7).
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